Scandal stories of college athletes getting cash from boosters or special treatment from professors are a staple of the sports press. But the real scandal, argues Taylor Branch in the October issue of The Atlantic, is how student-athletes are being exploited by universities and the NCAA. He writes, “college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless unjust.” One solution to this unjust system, argues Branch, is to pay the athletes.

To assess the crisis in college sports, we’ve asked a range of experts – athletes, administrators, legal experts, and journalists – three questions about what’s wrong with the system and how to fix it. Join the debate on Twitter using the hashtag #FixTheNCAA.